Gordon Brown has great clunking feet, too, and he has an uncanny knack of putting them in it - usually because he is being so transparently manipulative and canny. His new proposal to set a minimum service commitment for MPs, "naming and shaming" and possibly ejection from their seats of those who break it is a populist gimmick, unworkable, centralising and constitutionally wrong-headed.
Doh, you can see the thought processes clunking through his brain. I have to keep up with Cameron; I must show I can be tough with MPs; I must home in on their work with constituents; ah, more central control, that's tough. But the one thing that most MPs do concentrate on is wooing their constituents, keeping abreast of their correspondence, taking up individual and constituency cases. I don't mean to be cynical, but there is obviously a strong incentive behind their local activity: it all reinforces the incumbency factor and they can throw money at it - taxpayers' money that too often serves a largely party political end.
Meanwhile, Parliament and MPs are failing in their primary duty: to check all Bills with great care, to check the flow of secondary legislation, to hold government to account for its policies and actions. That's why we need a reinvigorated House of Commons, that's why we need independent-minded MPs, that's why we need a proportional election system.
Using the House as a second-rate citizen's advice bureau - when we do not even have a properly funded legal aid and assistance system in place locally - is on the first hand, a distraction from their real responsibilities, on the second, a national scandal which leaves too many people defenceless. We should be demanding a decent and systematic legal aid and welfare rights system across the country, which could very well be linked locally with MPs so that important issues can be identified and taken up nationally through Parliament.
Meanwhile David Cameron is polishing his tough stance too. He wants a "recall" system for MPs who are found guilty of fiddling their expenses (one, I assume, that will not be too tough on him for his own questionable conduct). Labour also are advocating something similar. But this idea simply means the creation of yet another central authority that will take the real decisions, leaving local publics to sweep up after them.
Local people need a more profound power of recall that they themselves can initiate, and that allows them to consider the performance of their MPs over the whole spectrum of their conduct - have they fiddled their expenses, ok, but did they vote for this outrageous war, or did they fail to campaign for a local hospital, have they reneged on an election promise (or has their party done so), are they for or against a referendum on the European Constitution, are they (oh happy day) for or against electoral reform? A paltry power to do party leaders' dirty work for them is yet more sham.
